Puritan Gentry Besieged 1650-1700

Trevor Cliffe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134918157
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The latter half of the seventeenth century saw the Puritan families of England struggle to preserve the old values in an era of tremendous political and religious upheaval. Even non-conformist ministers were inclined to be pessimistic about the endurance of `godliness' - Puritan attitudes and practices - among the upper classes. Based on a study of family papers and other primary resources, Trevor Cliffe's study reveals that in many cases, Puritan county families were playing a double game: outwardly in communion with the Church, they often employed non-conformist chaplains, and attended nonconformist meetings.

1
THE GODLY DIVIDED

During the summer of 1642, when the country was drifting into a civil war, most of the leading Puritan gentry decided to throw in their lot with Parliament, though with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Since they were generally men of conservative outlook it was not unlikely that their attachment to the cause of Parliament would be put under severe strain if it assumed a more radical character or if they felt that their own social and economic interests were threatened. When the Civil War was at its height Richard Knightley, a Puritan squire who was seated in Northamptonshire, complained in a letter to Sir John Dryden, who was one of the knights of the shire for that county, about the taxes he was having to pay for the support of parliamentary garrisons in the neighbourhood and expressed the hope that the war would soon be over:

god send us peace or else we shalbe all in the same condition …it is a mercie that we have here a very subsistence left us, and god knowes how longe we shall thus doe, without it please god to put an end to these differences we may expect worser times.

For Knightley the issues at stake, which were often succinctly described by well-to-do parliamentarians as ‘liberty and religion’, had ceased to be matters of prime importance.¹ As time went on more and more of these wealthy squires came round to the view that the paramount need was to conclude a treaty with the king which (they hoped) would bring about the restoration of order and stability. By December 1648 many Puritan MPs were so desperately anxious to secure his agreement to a constitutional settlement that they were prepared to forgo the kind of religious safeguards which they would formerly have considered essential.² Unfortunately for them the New Model Army had different ideas.

Among the Puritan county families with their mansions and extensive landed possessions there were relatively few political radicals. Sir John Bourchier, who signed the king’s death-warrant, was convinced that the act of regicide had been in accordance with God’s will, though his involvement may not have been solely the product of religious fervour. Strafford had written of him that

he Comes of a madd kindred, his father haveing many yeares lived and dyed a lunitick. This Gentleman generally observed to inherit a frenzy Constitution from his parent And to be more then halfe madd allready.

Before the time of the Civil War Sir John had been one of the king’s most refractory subjects and his unruly conduct had cost him a substantial fine and a term of imprisonment.³ John Hutchinson’s political views were much more extreme than those of his father, Sir Thomas, who had been a cautious and inactive parliamentarian. According to his wife, he concluded, after seeking God’s guidance, that it was his duty to sign the king’s death-warrant since he could not refuse to do so without betraying ‘the people of God’ who had taken up arms for Parliament. In 1659 a royalist observed that he would oppose anything tending to monarchy.⁴ There were other republican MPs who either chose to distance themselves from the proceedings against the king or withdrew before the final verdict was pronounced. Sir Henry Vane recounted in the course of a parliamentary speech delivered in 1659 that he had absented himself during the king’s trial ‘out of a tenderness of blood’ but went on to say that ‘all power being thus in the people originally, I myself was afterward in the business’.⁵ Sir James Harrington shared Vane’s belief in the imminence of the millenium when Jesus Christ would personally reign over his saints on earth. Viewed from this perspective the abolition of the Stuart monarchy may well have appeared not only necessary but inevitable. On the other hand, Harrington subsequently claimed that he had initially refused to sit in judgement on the king and that he had only changed his mind when threatened with a heavy fine.⁶ In retrospect Sir Arthur Hesilrige saw the king’s execution and the other revolu-tionary events which had taken place as the working of God’s will. The Long Parliament, he maintained, had been ‘a glorious Parliament for pulling down’; and in his opinion ‘whatever we pulled down was good and necessary to be pulled down’.⁷ Sir Gilbert Picketing was described by a contemporary as ‘a knight of the old stamp’ who had played an important part ‘in the change of the government from kingly to that of a commonwealth’.⁸ Sir Thomas Wroth told his fellow MPs in January 1648 that any form of government was preferable to a monarchy. As late as 1659 he was arguing that ‘If we find kings destructive to the nation, we may lay them aside’.⁹ Another Somerset landowner, John Pyne, helped to organise a county petition calling for the king to be brought to justice and would later emerge as a committed republican.¹⁰

Alongside the radicals in the Rump Parliament there were a considerable number of MPs of more moderate outlook. Lucy Hutchinson, the wife of John Hutchinson, writes that the members consisted of men who were either of the Independent faction ‘or of none at all, but look’d upon themselves as call’d out to manage a publick trust for their country’.¹¹ Some moderates like Sir William Armyne and Sir William Masham sat on the republican Council of State; others remained more politically detached.¹² Alexander Popham, who was one of the wealthiest landowners in England, was gradually won over to the royalist cause, though he was reluctant to become too deeply committed.¹³ Sir Thomas Jervoise’s decision to stay on at Westminster may have owed much to his hopes of obtaining compensation for the losses which he had sustained during the Civil War. In July 1649, a petition which he had submitted was referred to a committee for further consideration; and in September it was agreed that he should receive the sum of £9,000 out of the sequestered estate of the Marquess of Worcester.¹⁴ Bulstrode Whitelocke, who thought it expedient to retire to his country seat during the trial of the king, continued to serve as one of the Lords Commissioners of the Great Seal until 1655 when he was made a Treasury Commissioner. When taking up the first of these appointments (he tells us) he suffered an immediate loss of income: the profits did not amount to above £1,500 a year whereas his legal practice (which he had been forced to abandon) had brought in nearly £2,000 a year. Whitelocke prided himself on acting in accordance with his own judgement and conscience rather than the dictates of a party or faction. His contemporaries, however, were inclined to take a more cynical view of his conduct: among other things, he was described as a man who ‘complyes for his own interest’ and who was ‘guided more by policy than by conscience’.¹⁵

In the course of time a number of MPs who had stayed away after Pride’s Purge sought permission to return. Sir Thomas Wodehouse and Richard Norton were readmitted towards the end of 1651 and Sir John Dryden in April 1652.¹⁶ According to a verse chronicle relating to the Wodehouse family, Sir Thomas had been so shocked by the execution of the king that it shortened his life. This ‘hellish act’, we are told,

So smote his soul, that he ne’er joyed good day

Here-hence.¹⁷

Neither Wodehouse nor Dryden was particularly active in public affairs during the Interregnum but Norton became a member of the Council of State in November 1652. Colonel Norton, as he was usually styled, had once been branded by a royalist newspaper as ‘the great incendiary’ of Hampshire where he had large estates. He was on close terms with Cromwell who referred to him affectionately as ‘idle Dick Norton’. He appears, however, to have viewed the political infighting at Westminster with a certain degree of detachment: in March 1648, for example, he was writing to a friend that ‘you cannot be ignorant of the parties and divisions that are amongst them’. In May 1651 he had been questioned by the Council of State following an allegation that he was ready to take up arms on behalf of the king, but nothing had been proved against him.¹⁸

Whether radicals or moderates, the Puritan squires who sat in the Rump had remained firmly committed to the cause of Parliament throughout the Civil War. In matters of religion there was less than complete unanimity. At one extreme, Sir Henry Vane held views of an intensely personal nature which many of his contemporaries regarded as bizarre and even dangerous. In Richard Baxter’s view he was one of those who were primarily responsible for the break-up of the godly party since he had argued strongly for a universal liberty of conscience and had taught his adherents ‘to revile the Ministry, calling them ordinarily Blackcoats, Priests and other Names which then savoured of Reproach’.¹⁹ At the other extreme there was John Gurdon who favoured a Presbyterian system of church government.²⁰ In the main, however, the Rumper MPs were well disposed towards the cause of Independency, preferring at least some measure of toleration to what they regarded as the oppressive uniformity of Presbyterianism. Yet this liberal attitude had its limits: the wealthier members in particular were alarmed by the activities of sects which not only promoted novelty in religion but challenged the existing social order. In the first Parliament of the Protectorate Sir Gilbert Pickering, Sir William Strickland, Sir Thomas Wroth and Bulstrode Whitelocke all expressed concern about the sub-versive ideas which the Quakers were said to be propagating. ‘Quakerism’, lamented Pickering, ‘is as infectious as the plague’ while Wroth declared that the Quakers were ‘a very numerous party and ought to be taken a course withal speedily’.²¹

The Presbyterians, in the sense that the term was commonly used in the 1650s, primarily consisted of noblemen, gentry, ministers and members of the urban middle classes who had appeared on the side of Parliament during the Civil War but had subsequently become disenchanted. Clarendon was in no doubt that there was a Presbyterian cast of mind which was inherently cautious and conservative; indeed he even went so far as to portray Thomas Lord Fairfax as a man who was possessed of a ‘drowsy, dull, presbyterian humour’.²² Many of the Puritan squires who were regarded as Presbyterians had been secluded from the Commons as a result of Pride’s Purge or had chosen to absent themselves in a show of solidarity.²³ The military coup of December 1648 had abruptly ended an increasingly bitter conflict within the Long Parliament in which the Presbyterian MPs had been pursuing three main goals: a political settlement which preserved the monarchy while laying down constitutional safeguards; the disbandment of the New Model Army; and a godly religious settlement which was firmly based on the principle of uniformity in matters of doctrine, worship and organisation.²⁴ This did not mean, however, that the Presbyterians were a spent force in the country at large. Writing from his Somerset manor-house in December 1649, John Pyne observed that ‘the old deceitful interest under the notion of the Presbyterian party begins to rejoice and practise their old designs’.²⁵

For the Presbyterians the execution of the king and the establishment of a republic fully vindicated their belief that the radicals or Independents, as they sometimes called them, had perverted the cause of Parliament. A declaration condemning ‘the horrible and detestable murder’ of the king which was published shortly after his death bore the names of many of the Presbyterian ministers of London, among them William Gouge, Edmund Calamy, Jeremy Whitaker, Simeon Ashe, Thomas Case, James Nalton, Thomas

Cawton and Christopher Love.²⁶ Besides their political grievances the Presbyterians were deeply concerned about the state of religion and more particularly the widespread anarchy which prevailed. In a letter dispatched from London in May 1653 it was reported that ‘noe sett forme of governement more then of praier’ would satisfy the sectaries who were so numerous in the army and that ‘nothing is yet resolved towards a settlement’.²⁷ As Clarendon noted, the antipathy which the sectaries aroused was not wholly a product of religious susceptibilities. The Presbyterian party, he writes, ‘exceedingly inveighed against the licence that was practised in religion by the several factions of Independents, Anabaptists, Quakers, and the several species of these, who contemned all the magistrates and the laws established’.²⁸ The Presbyterians looked upon themselves as moderates who, unlike their adversaries, had remained faithful to the Solemn League and Covenant whose provisions included the maintenance of the rights and privileges of Parliament, the preservation and defence of the king’s person and authority, and a reformation of religion ‘according to the word of God, and the example of the best reformed Churches’. In the opinion of Sir William Waller, who had been one of the leading Presbyterians in the Commons, many of the members of the two Houses who like him had felt obliged to dissociate themselves from the extremists were persons ‘of eminent reputation for piety and integrity’.²⁹ On the other hand, the radicals were inclined to view the Presbyterians as men who had put self-interest before principle, abandoned the cause to which they had pledged themselves and sought to destroy all freedom of conscience in promoting their own religious designs. John Pyne claimed that when the Presbyterians were the dominant party in the Commons they ‘acted nothinge of Justice, right or freedome’ and that if the army had not carried out its purge ‘ruine must have befallen honest Men’.³⁰ Others went so far as to argue that many of them had always been of doubtful loyalty but had thought it prudent to conceal their royalist sympathies.³¹

Some Presbyterian gentry such as Sir William Waller and Sir John Gell had served as military commanders during the Civil War. There were others, however, who had appeared to be lukewarm or even worse. Sir John Holland had sought to ensure that Norfolk remained at peace while arguing that Parliament should come to terms with the king. Following criticism in the Commons over his conspicuous lack of commitment he had completely distanced himself from the conflict by joining his wife in the Dutch Netherlands.³² Sir Thomas Pelham had been relatively inactive both as an MP and as a member of the Sussex parliamentary committee. His feelings about the Civil War were probably fully in tune with those of his sister-in-law Lady Elizabeth Wilbraham who in July 1644 had told him that:

I doubt not but if it pleas god to settle the times wee shall eassilye reconcile all thinges… I harttily wish that you may be freed from what we dalye sufer, and enioye the unesti-mable blessi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations used in References
• 1 THE GODLY DIVIDED
• 2 DISAFFECTION
• 3 BRINGING BACK THE KING
• 4 BARTHOLOMEW DAY
• 5 CHANGE AND DECAY
• 6 A GODLY ELITE
• 7 IN COMMUNION
• 8 GOSPEL PREACHING
• 9 CONVENTICLES AND MEETING HOUSES
• 10 KEEPING A CHAPLAIN
• 11 THE GODLY HOUSEHOLD
• 12 EDUCATION IN AN UNGODLY WORLD
• 13 GETTING AND SPENDING
• 14 PARLIAMENT AND THE NONCONFORMIST INTEREST
• 15 FIN DE SIECLE
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index